Modbert
Daydream Believer
- Sep 2, 2008
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'Mosque' Debate Is a Red Herring | Gene Healy | Cato Institute: Commentary

All this posturing is getting tiresome. The "mosque" controversy isn't about property rights or religious freedom. It's a bogus issue seized by the GOP establishment to distract the rank-and-file from the party's reluctance to shrink government.
From all the caterwauling, you'd think the Park51 group planned to fashion a mock Kaaba out of trade center ashes and mount it atop the wreckage. But you can't see Ground Zero from the Park51 site — it's separated by two canyonlike city blocks, occupying the former site of a Burlington Coat Factory. "Hallowed ground," indeed.
The plans include building a large mosque — and a 500-seat theater, swimming pool and food court — which makes calling it a "mosque" just slightly more accurate than calling a YMCA a "church."
Republicans pose as the party of decentralization, yet here they are reversing Tip O'Neill's dictum, insisting that "all politics is national."
There's plenty of hypocrisy to go around, though. It's insulting to hear New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has persecuted bar owners for the crime of displaying ashtrays, wax rhapsodic about private property.
In a recent (pre-campaign?) appearance in Des Moines, Iowa, Newt Gingrich denounced Obama's "secular socialist machine," but, when asked, he declined to specify federal programs he would cut.
You see, cutting government is hard, and often unpopular. No surprise, then, that Boehner would rather play urban planner than embrace Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's "road map" for shrinking middle-class entitlements.
John Cornyn, R-Texas, head of GOP efforts to take back the Senate this fall, plans to make the Park51 "mosque" a major campaign issue. It's all too typical: Feed the rubes conservative identity politics, and, with luck, they'll be too distracted to notice you've grafted a Republican "K Street Project" atop the same old edifice of Big Government.
The establishment Right wants to play the Tea Party movement for suckers. It remains to be seen whether they'll play along.
